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1. Introduction
Because language is used daily in local contexts, it is reflective of local knowledge in the sense of Clifford Geertz (1983), more specifically of local consumer knowledge when people talk about individual and social consumption experiences, and explain product recipes, taste and pleasure related to food and drinks. While this may be important and meaningful to people as consumers, and therefore very useful for international marketing, it is largely forgotten by the prevailing academic research system. Too often, a single conceptual framework is called on to prove that a fairly general rule can be applied, whatever the context. In this paper, we outline and illustrate a method to search for local meanings in a qualitative, multi‐emic perspective with similarities emerging from within contexts rather than across contexts. Our perspective is based on words and anecdotal knowledge[1], however, central in the local worldview. Small sketches, using local texts, can be seen as a mise en réalité, a staging of consumer views about products, tastes and food experiences.
Food habits as well as taste are culturally constructed as central categories of the local lifestyle (Ger et al., 1999). People enjoy orality (in the Freudian sense) related to speaking the native language and eating familiar foods. The whole chain of meaning surrounding food extends from ingredients and recipes, the search for and purchase of food items, the preparation (or non‐preparation) of meals for individual and social enjoyment of food consumption. Language also specifically reflects a number of local food experiences related to ingredients, to cooking, to the enjoyment of meals in familiar settings, all this being summed up in the German term Esskultur. Therefore, linguistic cues mostly based on semantics, etymology and phonology, provide insights into emic meanings that may represent key information for the end‐customization of product and communication policies in local markets. A number of areas of cross‐cultural equivalence (conceptual, functional, translation, experiential) can be investigated through the use of linguistic cues. This paper shows how local words, used as emic signals, can be combined into full portraits of the local experiences in their uniqueness as narratives linking people to products and taste experiences, which can then be merged to derive commonalities emergent from within the contexts studied.
The first part...